Halloween In Westport

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

As a kid, the month of October was always greeted with much anticipation; Halloween was coming! Except for Christmas, this was probably the most exciting time of the year. For the little kids, Halloween was all about the candy. Within seconds of hitting the street, word would instantaneously spread among the trick-or-treaters as to who was giving out the best treats. “Best” usually meant the biggest or the most sugar-filled...hopefully both.
The main objective was to fill that loot bag! If you managed to fill it two or three times before the evening was over, that was even better. At the end of the night, the collected goodies would be dumped out on the living room floor and sorted into piles by order of desirability. Store bought treats were usually at the top of the list, occasionally people would even give out regular items like full-sized chocolate bars or boxes of Cracker Jacks. The miniature sized bars and small packages of liquorice were good too. Home-made treats, like fudge, squares, cookies and popcorn balls, could be high or low on the list, depending on who had made them and what flavour they were. Of this type of treat, the best could be found on the New Lane. If you made it to Mrs. Gaudet’s house before she ran out, you might be treated to a little brown-paper bag containing four of her delicious taffy candies; two molasses flavour, (my favourite) and two of the vanilla.
Then there were some people who actually had the nerve to hand out items that could almost be considered healthy. Into this category fell things like bags of salted peanuts, peanuts in the shell, little boxes of raisins and, at the very bottom of the desirability scale for most kids, fruit, like apples or even the occasional orange or banana. Thankfully, these items usually took up a small section of floor space compared to the huge piles of chocolate, chips and sugar laden treats. At the bottom end of the health scale was one item you could always depend on getting whether you wanted it or not, the orange and black wrapped Halloween chews were a gooey, sticky candy concoction that could suck the fillings right out of your teeth. I also found that, after eating fifteen or twenty in a row, they tended to make you feel a little queasy!
As you got a bit older, it was still about the candy, but also about the costumes. You always tried to come up with a cooler get-up than the next person. On Halloween day you got to wear your costume to school and there was sometimes even a prize for the best outfit. This was in the days before there were a lot of store-bought costumes available so either your mother had to spend a lot of time sewing something fancy or you would put your imagination to work to come up with a disguise using everyday items. This usually resulted in a lot of hobos wearing their parent’s old work clothes, ghosts draped in old bed sheets and pirates with red or blue polka-dot handkerchief headscarves and a sword whittled from a trap lath.
Then, when you got to a certain age, you would be old enough to join in the ancient tradition of roughnecking. For some there would be an overlap period here where people would go out trick-or-treating in the early part of the evening, then safely stash their candy at home before dumping the costume and joining the older kids out roaming the roads. “Roughnecks” were concerned mostly with the “trick” part of trick-and-treating. There were a few traditional pranks that were played on Halloween night. I remember when StClair Cann had a picket fence around his house on the Front Road, every Halloween his gate would disappear, usually to be found the next morning hanging from a tree in the front yard of a near-by neighbour. Outhouse tipping was another popular joke to play on people, especially if they were inside it at the time! Myrna Garron had one of the last outhouses in town and so for several years had to endure the brunt of the Halloween toilet tippers.
But the main endeavour as soon as it got dark was to make the roads impassable for any vehicle. This was accomplished by dragging pretty well anything that was movable out into the road. Teenagers who were hard pressed to find the energy to carry the groceries home for their mother during the day suddenly found themselves endowed with super powers as soon as the sun fell below the horizon.
I remember one of the first Halloweens when I was allowed to go out again after the trick-and-treating was over. A bunch of teen-agers were moving an old double-ender that had been hauled out of the water and left beside the road. It had been there for a couple of years and didn’t look like it was ever going back to sea, so they decided it would make a great barricade. The old boat was lifted from its resting place and swung out across the road. The next morning I happened to be passing by the same spot and watched as it was returned to its former location. Twenty men and a tractor struggled for half an hour to undo what a dozen kids had done in a few minutes the night before.
On an other occasion a great wall was built across the road in front of Bowers’ store. This was done using empty oil barrels. The first couple of rows were no problem, but the rest were more of a challenge. At first a couple of guys climbed up and balanced on the stack of drums while the others passed up the barrels, by the time they were up to the fourth row, the guys on the ground had to swing the barrel back and forth between them and then toss it up to be caught by the guys on top. They were tossing them up five or six barrels high when they ran out of barrels, otherwise who knows how high they would have gone.
One year, Halloween fell right in the middle of a construction job going on at the lower breakwater. The material being used to rebuild the wharf was stored along the side of the road and the job manager (a mainlander) was warned about what might happen to all that lumber overnight. He stacked everything in neat piles, nailed boards across them and left the Island that afternoon feeling confidant that he had made everything secure. The next morning he returned to find his entire inventory of twenty-four foot, eight-by-eight timbers stacked up log cabin style in the middle of the road. He took one look at his building material reaching up past the telephone wires and, in a most un-island like reaction, called the Police. The R.C.M.P. arrived at the school just before noon and pulled the grade eleven and twelve boys out of class, marched them all down the road and made them disassemble the previous night’s project.
Everybody left their cars at home on Halloween, the stores closed early and for the most part, adults stayed home. Even though all the kids worked hard to make it impossible to drive anywhere on the island, if an emergency arose or if an older person found themselves caught on the road after dark, a passageway would be quickly cleared, usually by the same group who had blocked it in the first place. Of course, there were those who deliberately challenged the barricades. One year David Pugh took his father’s Jeep and tried to see how far he could get. He crashed and crawled around, over and through several piles of debris, but the roughnecks rallied to the cause and worked even harder to block him in with bigger and higher walls. David did manage to get the old truck an impressive distance up the road but eventually had to give up when he acquired a couple of flat tires in the process.
Although it sounds as if Halloween night was a wild and crazy time when all the rules were thrown out, it wasn’t quite as lawless as it sounds. Lobster season was just a couple of weeks away, and the wharves and roadsides were lined with traps, they might be perfect barricade building material, but traps were off limits and left untouched. For the most part, anything of real value or necessary to someone’s livelihood was left alone and very little real damage was done. Halloween was a night when the normal order of things was turned on its head for a few hours, but the next day, everything was usually disassembled and put back where it should be in short order...then the planning would begin for next Halloween.